Photography has long been popular, but has become particularly so now that digital cameras permit images to be captured and viewed without the time and cost needed to provide and process celluloid film.
Digital cameras can be manufactured cheaply and made small in size, and they are now included in many diverse types of electronic equipment, for example in mobile telephones, PDAs, personal computers, television sets (e.g. so-called ‘smart TVs’) and children's toys. However, not all electronic devices contain a camera, and even when a camera is present the specifications and therefore the images that can be captured vary hugely. For example, a high-end Digital Single Lens Reflex (DSLR) camera is typically very large, very heavy, and very expensive, whilst the small camera typically embedded into a mobile telephone is typically very small, very light and comparatively cheap to produce. However, the physical and functional limitations of the phone camera commonly result in it producing images that are highly inferior in quality to similar scenes captured by the DSLR camera.